Read Dr. Peter Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

The Devils/Dostoyevsky (1870)
One Hundred Years of Solitude/Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967/1970 English)

Both are also on Harold Bloom’s list.

Really enjoyed this, but have to say I find detective fiction incredibly confusing, so many characters and so much plot, and you need to remember it all. I kept flipping back when a character was re-introduced to try to figure out who they were. And Hammett apparently set himself the task, when writing this, of seeing how many characters he could murder in one book, so maybe it’s a little more confusing than usual. Hammett’s nameless detective (referred to as The Continental Op, I have learned) is summoned to Personville by a man who is dead before he even gets to meet with him. The Op finds that Personville is a cesspool of corruption and decides, after securing a hefty payment, to clean the town up. Much bloodshed and many plot twists ensue. Hammett is a good writer and that kept me reading even when I wasn’t totally sure what was going on. The Op is a fascinating character too, cold, hard, but fat and out of shape, not a romantic hero, fairly amoral, but also likeable. Hammett had worked for Pinkertons and based his character on that experience. Will read more Hammett, I liked this.

I love Kathy Acker and I don’t totally get this book. The story of Janey, who leaves an incestuous relationship with her father in Mexico to move to New York where she is eventually kidnapped into sex slavery; later she gets cancer and travels with Jean Genet. Acker’s work is collage, this book contains drawings, poems, handwritten text, a re-telling of The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne. It is also full of graphic sexual language, like all of Acker’s work. She admitted she was out to shock with this book, and it still does shock, but we know what to expect from her work now. And I think it is a deeply moral or ethical book too, and I felt this when I heard Acker read back in the 80s: her protagonists are sex addicts, self-destructive women who believe they deserve pain and abuse and who seek out sex compulsively, the more degrading the better. But they do this out of a search for love. Her books are always about love, about the search for true human connection. That her characters are confused about what it is or how to get it is beside the point. And, besides, a whole bunch of the world shares her protagonists’ confusion of love and sex and pain. She didn’t invent it; she merely described what she saw and what she felt personally. One of the women who speaks about her work in Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker, the documentary recently released about her, says that Janey was Acker’s alter ego, and another one says that everything in the books is true. One should always take claims like these with a bit of a grain of salt because of course all of this is transformed, however little, in the crucible of art, of writing. But Acker’s work is clearly confessional, deeply personal, and thus haunting. You sense that she put herself on the line each time she sat down to write. An inspiring and frustrating writer, as there is a slapdash quality to her work that makes one long at times for a more structured, tightly edited book. And yet the apparent anarchy of her novels would seem to be quite deliberate, an evocation of the world as she experienced it.

Like Water for Chocolate.

I LOVED this movie. Watched it in Spanish…very magical hearing it that way the romance seemed more dramatic. It was way more intense. It never really occurred to me that reading a book translated in English would have the same affect as a movie being translated. It lost a lot of that intensity. It also seems a lot more rushed as odd as that my seem. Usually it’s the movies that are more rushed.

Knowing how beautiful the movie was, the book is kind of hard to get through. I’m wondering if I’ll get through it? I also wonder how I would have liked the book if I had read it before I’d seen the movie? But that was years ago… so I guess Ill see how this one pans out.

off the list to get me started. I think to help me keep track of them Ill do them in chunks of ten. I’ve also made a special Boxalls list on my goodreads too :) time to put in some requests with the librarY!

I’ve gone through some of this list & I’ve added some of the books to my list. I’m not sure how far Ill get on this goal as some of the books don’t exactly appeal to me. But I’m going to get through as much as I can…see how it goes.

of mice and men by john steinbeck
the hobbit by j.r.r. tolkien
house of leaves by mark z. danielewski
everything is illuminated by jonathan safran foer
never let me go by kazuo ishiguro
atonement by ian mcewan
the plot against america by philip roth
white teeth by zadie smith
the sea by john banville
the reader by bernard schlink

is a goal I can totally get lost in! I love it :) I think Ill add like 10 books at a time to my amazon wish list haha

It would be allmost impossible for me to do it but i can try.

46 down,
955 to go

2000s
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen*
White Teeth – Zadie Smith

1900s
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
V. – Thomas Pynchon
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four-George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster

1800s
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

1700s
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Pre-1700

Apparently I get more and more illiterate as the centuries unfold. hah. Now that I’ve actually browsed the list I’m not sure I want to do this after all. I DO however really want Boxall’s book.